Page 30 of Better in Black
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You know more than I do about what happened next, because it happened without me. After Valentine’s father died, he changed. He became harder, his demands for change turning from a passion to an obsession. He wore the red Marks of mourning, long past the usual time given for it, and for the first time I saw you look at him differently. You, too, had lost someone. You responded to his pain as you had never responded to his charm.
I didn’t understand that, not until I asked you to be my date to the Academy’s Winter Ball. I told no one I was planning to attempt this terrifying feat, not even myparabatai—it seemed too likely I would chicken out. In the end, I disguised my terror by pretending it was no big deal. You were going, I was going—why not put on our finest clothes and go together? I was better at pretending, by then. I lied too well.
“Are you asking because you feel sorry for me, not having a date?” you said, and I just stared at you. You were the most beautiful girl in school; how could anyone feel sorry for you? “Shows what you know.” You patted my cheek. “I’m going with Valentine.”
And the world turned itself inside out.
I remember finding myself back in my room, not knowing how I got there. I remember sitting on my bed with my head in my hands, trying to make sense of it. But it made a terrible sort of sense already.
I knew the two of you were the best of us. You were the two people I loved most in the world and I wanted you both to find happiness. So if I were the good friend I pretended to be, shouldn’t I be thrilled for you to find it in each other?
Madeleine knew she was my second choice, and a distant second at that. I suppose I should have tried harder to convince her otherwise. But youth is thoughtless, to the point of being cruel. Or at least I was. I escorted her, I danced with her, but the whole night, I watched you.
You and Valentine, gliding through the ballroom like you were the only ones there. A different species than the rest of us: more graceful, more beautiful. More passionate. I saw how you looked at him—I’d never seen you look at anyone that way. Certainly not me.
When you finally told me, weeks later, that he’d asked you to exchange rings with him—a serious promise of a future together—you asked what I thought.
“You know me better than anyone,” you said. “Do we make sense? Is this a good idea?”
I knew that night at the ball, Madeleine in my arms and Valentine in yours, that I would never love anyone the way I loved you.
And I knew you would never love me, not the way you loved him.
So I lied to you. And I never stopped.
—
What if?
What if I had asked you to be my date sooner, if I had asked like it mattered, like there was nothing on earth I wanted more than you in my arms?
What if I had said,No, it makes no sense for you to be with Valentine, because you’re meant to be with me?
What if, before we met Valentine, I had said,Be mine, and let me be yours?
What if that night in Brocelind Forest, when we were still too young to know there was more than one kind of love, what if I had said,I need you. I want you to stay?
Would everything have been different? I try not to ask myself that. Because what if I could have spared you all that suffering, all that loss? But also because what if nothing I said could have made any difference? What if in every possible universe, you still took Valentine in your arms, and let him carry you away?
—
You know what happened next. It is a time that even now is painful for me to remember. You and Valentine were married. I was hissuggenes;I walked beside him up the aisle, my presence meant to bless your joining. I remember the light in the garden as it fell on you, a bride so beautiful it took my breath. I remember your smile. I remember going home that night to a silent, empty house.
I remember the first time you came to me and told me you had grown afraid of Valentine. Of his rages, the strange sounds in the house, the night he spent away, returning with red eyes and shaking hands.
I asked him about it, carefully. For a moment, I thought I saw fury flash across his face. Then he calmly told me he’d been devoting his time to cleaning out the nest of the werewolves who’d killed his father. They were brutal, irredeemable killers, he told me, and invited me to come along with him on his next raid. A little hurt he hadn’t brought me with him before, I accompanied him into Brocelind.
Whether the werewolf nest he brought me to in fact containedthe lycanthropes who had slain his father, I do not know. What I know is that they were not brutal or irredeemable killers. Many were children. Many wailed in fear when they saw Valentine, his seraph blade blazing as he rode into their midst, calling out for me to follow him, follow him into battle…
And that is all I remember until I awoke, my shoulder bandaged, a werewolf bite festering on my shoulder. I remember the fever, the illness that followed, but more than anything else I remember the cool touch of your hand, the sight of your face, the terror in your eyes.
And there was joy, mixed in with the pain and the fear, even in those last moments of my existence as a Shadowhunter. Joy that you cared. That you were worried about me.
—
You always felt sorry for what happened to me, as if the night I got bitten was the end of something. You saw it as loss. Any Shadowhunter would. It’s why Valentine gave me that dagger and instructed me to kill myself; it’s why he was arrogant enough to assume I would do it.
